Starting Campus Conversations

In Florida and around the country, faculty are using information and data to organize into unions.

There’s plenty of evidence that the crisis in higher education is boiling over on campuses across the country. Below are resources, statistics and data that will spotlight the price we pay when colleges act like corporations instead of focusing on students. The trends revealed in these statistics, which show an alarming rise gain in student debt loads and a growing dependence on contingent faculty, offer some of the most compelling reasons for faculty and graduate students to come together to raise to standards in higher education.

Resources

For a growing number of faculty and graduate students, this movement is not only about respect, benefits and job security — it’s about being able to pay the rent. Building on our work to show the how colleges and universities pay low wages, we have released state-level dataon adjunct faculty who rely on public assistance, also broken down by sector in select states. For part-time faculty who live in Boston,Baltimore,St. Louis,Vermont, or upstate New York can check out local reports on the High Cost of Adjunct Living.

Administrator salary guide

Even as faculty contingency and tuition are on the rise, universities are spending more and more on executive salaries and new administrative positions. Use this guide to look up the salary at your own school. What you find may surprise you. If you work for a public university, there can be a wealth of information available about funding for these institutions.

Adjunct Living Calculator

Being a part-time faculty member can be a financial struggle. The Adjunct Living Calculator will tell you how many classes do you, a contingent professor, have to teach per year to afford your basic needs— housing, healthcare, food, the ability to retire — in your community.

Our report, Crisis at the Boiling Point, helps tell the full story of what’s happening in academic labor by documenting and analyzing just how much work adjunct faculty are doing, and if you are doing it for free.